Oceanside songwriter has stared down cancer twice

Oceanside  Ali Gilmore had been playing the guitar for less than two years when she found out about the cancer.

It was Stage IV colon cancer that had spread to her left lung, and everything she read at the time was saying she wouldn’t survive.

“I’ve always been one of those people who, if somebody tells me I can’t or shouldn’t be able to do something, then I’m going to prove them wrong,” she said with a grin when we met Friday at a coffee shop in South Oceanside. “At that point, I dropped all thoughts of music and just focused on beating it.”

It was a rude interruption, to be sure: After growing up in a musical household, Gilmore decided in 2008 to take up the guitar, and the following year wrote a song for her father on his 80th birthday.

She rallied her friends and paid for a few days at a local recording studio, cutting six songs on a CD that she handed her dad on his birthday.

“Music was really important to him,” she said. “One friend said to me, ‘You know, there’s a lot of work involved in cutting a CD.’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah? Watch this.’ It definitely made my dad happy, and it was a hell of a lot better than a tie.”

Gilmore is an upbeat person by nature — talkative and friendly, with an easy smile. To give you an idea of her impulsiveness, she recorded those six original songs in June 2009 and handed them to her father the following month in the Seattle home where she grew up.

“I’ve found that the best things I do in life are when I don’t have time to think,” she told me.

A year later, in July 2010, she certainly wouldn’t be afforded any time to think when the diagnosis was made. “Stage IV” are not words that land lightly.

“My brain was racing, my heart was pounding out of my chest,” she recalled. “I just looked at (the doctor) and said, ‘Can you fix it?’ He said, ‘You do realize this is going to be a long road?’

“It was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.”

First came the surgery, almost immediately after the cancer was detected.

Then chemotherapy — 18 cycles, or three rounds, to kill the disease that had spread to her left lung.

Finally, she underwent a novel form of radiation therapy called radiosurgery, which burned the cancerous cells on her lung with a precise, guided beam of radiation.

Remission was announced in the summer of 2011, and Gilmore began allowing herself to think about music again.

But first, she had to write.

Hailing from the technology sector, Gilmore compiled her thoughts about cancer into an entertaining, concise manual that meets the reader at the moment of diagnosis.

“What if you only have six months left?” she wrote. “Do you really want to spend it buried under a pile of stress and regrets, or would you rather spend it laughing, loving, and enjoying life?”